Selling the West

You only need to consider the movie or music industry to realize that people can make a lot of money from selling popular culture . The passage below is from a book about a small town in Montana that decided to sell popular culture. As you read the passage, think about why so many tourists would have been willing to "buy" the image of the cowboy.

The developing tourism industry produced the most immediate impetus for [the] public assumption of cowboy westernness by local westerners. In many places around the region, westerners began to dress like cowboys and cowgirls in the 1920's and 1930's because town boosters noticed that the ''Wild West''--cowboys in particular--''sold'' well to tourists. As small towns in the West began to lose their economic base in extractive industries [i.e., coal mining], local leaders sought, almost desperately, to buoy up sagging economies through infusions of tourism revenue. Most visitors, however, did not really care about seeing a West of immigrant miners, corporate industrialism, and insurance salesmen. Tourists preferred western places that met their expectations-shaped by movies and novels-of what the West should look like: log cabins, horses, Indians, and cowboys. So, catering to the demands of tourists, westerners began to re-create their towns and themselves to appear appropriately western for their visitors. They constructed log cabin facades for brick buildings, held rodeos, and dressed themselves up in neckerchiefs, blue jeans, and cowboy hats. The same ''wild'' figures that residents had driven out of town in the 1890s became the new heroes of a twentieth-century interpretation of the nineteenth-century past.

At the heart of this drive to appear ''western'' stood the powerful image of the cowboy, a deceptively simple figure with a variety of modern-day representatives in the West. By the mid-twentieth century, the cowboy stood unchallenged as the quintessential hero of the American West, and indeed of the entire nation. He, more than any other national figure, represented American fortitude, independence, and initiative. Easterners and westerners alike strove to borrow some of the glamour of this national hero, dressing cowboy hats, boots, and pearl-buttoned shirts to emulate the western icon. . . .

By the 1930s, the Crow Indians around Red Lodge certainly knew the value of ''playing Indian'' for tourists in search of the ''authentic'' Wild West. . . . Dressed in an imposing full-feathered headdress, [Crow member] Big Nose used his own ''Indianness'' as a source of income. . . . Red Lodge boosters and Max Big Nose alike advanced an image of the traditionally ''Indian'' Indian, not the boundary shifting figure of the cowboy Indian. . . .

Under the contract with the rodeo association, Indians agreed to dress ''authentically,'' ride in the daily rodeo parades, compete in specific Indian events, and establish a tepee camp alongside the arena that was essentially an open museum for curious observers.

^{Source: Christensen, Bonnie. Red Lodge and the Mythic West. University Press of Kansas, 2002. 89, 91, 104-105.}